Imagine if you had watched yesterday's titanic Niners-Packers game and no one had mentioned the weather. The field was digitally made green and you couldn't see the player's breath, or their hoods and shell jackets or any of that shit. Would you have noticed that some kind of outside force was affecting the game play? I don't think I would have. Despite playing in near-inhumane conditions, these two teams still played remarkably competent football, and that is fucking amazing.

I yell and scream and shit on football players every chance I get because I'm a fan and fans are terrible people, but it's easy to forget just how good every single player out on that field is. Whether it's cold or snow or rain or whatever, NFL teams make the sport look remarkably easy in terrible conditions, and for that, I am eternally grateful. What you saw late yesterday afternoon was professional football at its most professional. (And if it's any consolation to the players yesterday, I experienced SYMPATHY COLD while watching at home).

VILLAIN: THE EVIL COLD

Every member of the NFL media should get on their hands and knees and kiss Roger Goodell's stupid ginger feet for staging the Super Bowl out in Jersey next month. Stick that game in a cold weather site and PRESTO! You have something to write and talk about all week. No need to hope and pray that Joey Porter shows up and says something dumb. You can just look at the weather forecast and speculate away. Super Bowl media week is essentially going to be one giant conversation between you and your neighbors about how shitty the weather is going to be. HEARD IT MIGHT SLEET.

By the way, I ate up all the cold porn yesterday. If Pam Oliver had pointed out a frozen puddle of urine on the sidelines, I would have been rapt. I couldn't get enough.

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HERO: Andrew Luck

It's not just that Andrew Luck brought the Colts back from a 28-point deficit on Saturday, it's that he did it so quickly. The Colts scored their three third quarter TDs (cutting the margin to ten points) in under ten minutes of gameplay. Luck was so quick to get to the line and rip off pass after pass that he seemed to warp time and space itself, as if he had somehow found all the time in the world to come back and crush the Chiefs. Imagine being a Chiefs fan and watching the clock barely move. By the time KC had lost its 90th player to injury, the Colts' miracle comeback seemed inevitable. It wasn't even that shocking when they took the lead. In Luck's hands, an NFL game became SEC football, where no lead is safe and defenses NEVER bother to show up in the last ten minutes or so.

VILLAIN: Whatever vengeful God hates the Chiefs

When you root for a star-crossed team like the Bills or Lions or Browns or Chiefs and things go REALLY wrong, it's easy to believe that your team's woes are part of some terrifying cosmic plan: that there is a God, and that this God hates your team and is punishing you, perhaps for masturbating too often. This isn't true, of course. Bad luck is just bad luck, and the Chiefs actually have a Super Bowl title to their name. But when you have lived with that bad luck for DECADES, and when the bad luck happens with such remarkable consistency, you can't help but wonder if it was some kind of evil poltergeist lofted that pass for Cyrus Gray jussssst a bit too high. That's what losing a 28-point lead will do to you. It will make you crazy.

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HERO: Mike McCoy

Oh man, what a difference it makes when Norv Turner isn't your coach. I kept expecting the Chargers to do all kinds of Charger-y things yesterday in Cincy: blowing leads, running up the middle on 3rd-and-5, committing pass interference at the exact wrong time, etc. I was so used to them ecuting a Norv Turner-style collapse that it was shocking when they held on and won in decisive fashion. When you have a good coach, all the bad feelings go away. It also helps when Andy Dalton apparently has money on you.

VILLAIN: The rote game-winning field goal drive

Both the Saints and Niners won yesterday with flawlessly ecuted game-winning drives that ate up the clock and ended with a chip shot field goal to seal the victory. BO-RING. This is the least satisfying possible ending to a tight NFL game, when one team slowly and methodically sucks all the suspense out of the affair until we're left with an anticlimax. There's only one way to fix this: The kicker must kick the ball past a dragon. It's the only viable solution.

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